Easy as Ezekiel, Revelation and Daniel

The last time I got cornered and witnessed to, I got a lecture on how the Bible should be taken literally and at face value. The person insisted that “no one needs a scholar to tell them what the Bible means!” (This would have been more convincing if he’d been reading from Greek manuscripts instead of a translation produced by a whole room full of scholars.)

Yet, when left with a Bible for a suitable length of time, the same people will produce timelines like the following:

As folks like Fred Clark will tell you, there’s no quick and easy explanation of the Rapture in the Biblical text. You have to take pinch of Daniel and a soupçon of Ezekiel and fold it into the Revelation of St. John. Is this really “face value”? Can we call this “literal” in any meaning of the word?